Online Dating

Dating is a numbers game, but what happens when you’re not 23 any longer – do the numbers start working against you?

No! The truth is, people are looking for partners of all ages. More than half the U.S. adult population is single, and many are baby boomers and Gen Xers looking to find love after a break-up or divorce, or want to get married for the first time. You are not alone.

The media would like us to think that young daters are the only ones out there who are actively dating and forming relationships, but that is far from the truth. Older daters are higher in number, but are slowly adapting to the technology available to them – specifically online and mobile dating. The stigma is gone for the most part, thanks to the ease, accessibility and popularity of mobile dating apps. How many 40-somethings do you know using Tinder? Probably more than you’d expect.

If you are over 40 and wondering how to approach this whole dating thing, here are some tips:

Try different sites and apps. Not everyone over age 40 should be on eHarmony. Not every guy should be on Tinder. Before you join, ask yourself what your goals are. Do you want to test the dating waters without getting serious? Do you want to get married? Or would you like to find a girlfriend/ boyfriend for companionship? Different sites and apps offer different experiences, so be sure to research first.

Be honest in your approach. So many women lie about their ages, and so many men lie about their height. They want to attract more people, but in the end when you are meeting dates in real life, they will be upset by the lie. Don’t start any relationship this way. The people who are right for you won’t let age or height be a factor, so don’t you either.

Let go of your baggage. There’s nothing more important than examining past relationships and seeing where we can get rid of old beliefs and thought patterns that aren’t serving us. Anger and fear are the two worst things to hang on to – for anyone. Go to counseling, talk with a friend, start a practice in yoga – do what it takes to help lift you beyond your current fear and anger, and into a place of greater peace before you date. It will be worth it.

Think about what you want in a relationship. It’s more important to understand how you want to feel in a relationship, rather than looking for a guy or girl who checks off those “boxes” – like being hot, or educated, or successful. These don’t matter nearly as much when you are in the relationship. Instead, think about the kind of person you’d like to spend time with.

Cultivate your own happiness and personal life. Do you enjoy travel, riding your bike, or cooking? Don’t wait for a partner to plan your next trip, or a cycling buddy before you research new biking trails, or a boyfriend before you start cooking elaborate 4-course meals. Do it for you! When you do things that make you happy, it puts you in a great headspace to attract others who are happy in their lives, too.

If you’ve heard Brandon Wade’s name lately, it’s likely because he’s the CEO of SeekingArrangement.com and SA is currently embroiled in quite the scandal. Earlier this summer, the Web was rocked with the news that Google executive Forrest Hayes died of a fatal dose of heroin, allegedly injected by a prostitute named Alix Tichelman while the two were on a yacht.

Tichelman and Hayes met on SeekingArrangement.com, the infamous Las Vegas-based sugar daddy dating site. The news has put the spotlight on Wade, his company, and the complex world of financially-motivated dating. In the wake of the scandal, Eric Van Susteren of the Silicon Valley Business Journal spoke with Brandon Wade about the past, present, and future of his notorious website. Here are a few highlights of their conversation:

Van Susteren: How’d you get into this business?

Wade: I got into it because I was dateless, and I was shy and I was just completely awkward. My mother had always told me when I was growing up to channel all my sexual frustration into my books because when you get older and have money to be generous with, the girls will flock to you. When I graduated I was making six figures, and I still had that problem so I created this website because normal dating sites weren't working for me.

Van Susteren: How did your mother feel about being the inspiration of this business?

Wade: She loves it, and she thought it was funny that her advice would turn into a dating website eventually. People are going to want to criticize this any way they can but it's the same kind of advice mothers are giving daughters anyway. Telling them when you grow up you'll be treated like a princess by your knight in shining armor who's going to take care of you. How different is that? It's the same message: That you want to find a good, wealthy, successful husband or boyfriend who will take care of you.

Van Susteren: So how’s business?

Wade: Business has been doing better and better. We keep seeing growth and I don't think it's going to stop. We're moving away from the sugar daddy angle as well. It's still an important aspect of the site, but our marketing message is a more general now: “Relationship on your terms.”

Van Susteren: What’s the purpose of that move?

Wade: I think we sort of reached a plateau. When you look at relationships, not all people are really wealthy and successful, but they have specific conditions that they want in terms of what they want to find in a relationship. And that's what Seeking Arrangement is all about: It's about two people coming together, defining what want from each other, what they expect from each other, and creating a relationship based on that. It should be about anything — it shouldn't be just about sugar daddies.

For more information on this dating site you can read our review of Seeking Arrangement.

Judgment and dating go hand in hand. Even before online dating became so popular, singles would assess their dates based on a few traits they deemed important – like sense of humor, work ethic, kindness, or how hot they looked in a pair of jeans - to see whether or not they were worth a second date. But at least you could go on a first date knowing essentially nothing, hoping for the best. You had to deal with the element of surprise before you were allowed to judge.

Now, all of the mystery has been removed from dating. Dating websites like OkCupid allow you not only to see the profiles of potential dates and pick them apart, but you can also see ratings given by other people (that is, if you pay $10 for the premium service). If one of your matches gets two stars out of five, you’d be less likely to ask him/ her out. After all, aren’t we influenced by the opinions of others?

The more important question is: should we be so influenced, especially when it comes to meeting someone for the first time?

Dating apps like Lulu are focused solely on reviews. The app was intended to be a place where women could get feedback about potential dates before they decided to go out with them, kind of a girlfriend safety mechanism. But it is actually more like a Yelp for dating – where women rate guys according to their looks, how they behaved on a date, sense of humor, and other qualities. So if a guy receives a low score, women who check him out on Lulu would probably avoid dating him.

The problem with this rating system is two-fold. First, the numbers can be skewed. Sure, maybe the guy is a jerk and has twenty women who will agree with that assessment. Then his low rating makes sense, and other women would want to know before going out with him. However, if a guy only has a couple of reviews, and one of them is from a jilted ex, then it brings his overall score down. In fact, what’s to stop any woman from retaliation through Lulu’s rating system?

The second problem with Lulu’s system is that it disqualifies too many potential dates based on factors that might not be important to every woman. For instance, maybe a man’s sense of humor rates low because the women he’s been out with didn’t understand his quirky style. Does that mean you – his next potential date – shouldn’t go out with him? What if his sense of humor is exactly your type?

Rating systems serve a good purpose in dating as far as warning women of potentially bad dates. But if you base whether or not to take a chance on someone solely on a rating system, you are severely limiting your options. Because you never know who the right guy for you is until you actually meet him.

Are you an eHarmony or OkCupid user? Chances are, you wouldn’t join both sites, because they cater to two different types of users. eHarmony attracts daters who are more serious and committed to finding a partner, whereas OkCupid skews a bit younger and takes itself a lot less seriously.

But regardless of which online dating site you choose – wouldn’t you want to understand how to use it most effectively, so you could obtain better results? Would you want to know how other people are using the site, and potentially how they are matched and communicate with you?

Harvard Business School professor Mikolaj “Misiek” Piskorski is the author of the newly released book A Social Strategy: How We Profit From Social Media. In conducting research for his book, he obtained data sets from both OkCupid and eHarmony to determine how different demographics communicate, flirt, and connect over the websites. He set out to see the differences in communication styles between men and women as well as older and younger users.

In the course of writing his book, which is designed for businesses with social media presences, Piskorski studied the online dating habits of millions of users. After personal information was made anonymous so it wouldn’t be compromised, he started his search: specifically, how online daters send messages to each other, how they flirt online, and how they use the sites.

In a recent interview with Fast Company magazine, Piskorski said, “Where eHarmony varies dramatically is communication. People reach out to each other more on eHarmony, and get more responses on there. The people you traditionally would think have the hardest time reaching out to people do very well on eHarmony.”

What does this mean in terms of day to day use of the site? Generally speaking, because each person's pool of matches is smaller on a site like eHarmony where the matches are qualified, they tend to have an easier time reaching out. For timid users, it’s an empowering thing – they will message more on a site like eHarmony than on OkCupid when they know they are competing with thousands of other members.

Another reason for the increased communication on eHarmony is due to the fact that older women and men who are older, more overweight, or shorter than average daters are also more likely to reach out on eHarmony without feeling intimidated. Again, the limited number of matches he feels is a primary reason. Because eHarmony users have fewer choices than okCupid users, they are more likely to reach out, especially women, to people they are matched with.

So does less mean more? Perhaps. OkCupid users tended to gravitate towards specific matching services that offered more bite-sized options, too. For women, it was Quiver, which showed them matches that OkCupid thought would be good based on their likes and communication patterns. For men, it was a service called Quickmatch, where they could look at photos and basic profile information and rate the users according to what they find attractive.

Perhaps a study of dating app communication will be next on Pikorski’s list.

When people talk about the shot heard round the world, they typically mean a gunshot. In this case, it was the fatal dose of heroin injected into Google executive Forrest Hayes. Hayes met his untimely death on a yacht, during a tryst with a prostitute named Alix Tichelman who allegedly administered the drug.

The not-so-unlikely pair (let’s face it, rich techie types and sex workers have always gone together well) met on SeekingArrangement.com, a popular Las Vegas-based site where sugar babies set up profiles to meet sugar daddies. It seems like Seeking Arrangement CEO Brandon Wade is always in the news for one thing or another, but this might be the first time he and his site have gotten so much national attention.

Wade said in an interview that after Tichelman’s arrest was announced on July 9, Seeking Arrangement’s site traffic doubled and its new member count jumped to 12,000 per day from an average of 2,000. He also said that the site should generate at least twice the $10 million in sales it brought in last year, proving once again that one man’s tragedy is another man’s meal ticket.

Eric Van Susteren of the Silicon Valley Business Journal spoke with Brandon Wade about how Hayes’ death and Tichelman’s arrest are changing the future of Seeking Arrangement – if at all.

Wade has always taken a cavalier approach to his work, and it seems this time is no exception. Is he worried that the case will affect his business negatively? “I don't think so,” he says. “It seems that bad news ends up being good news when it comes to traffic for our website. What I'm more concerned about is making sure we tighten up our policies and look at where people misuse the site and come up with new innovations about where this can happen.”

That being said, he maintains that Seeking Arrangement is one of the “strictest websites in terms of terms of use, website policy and kinds of tools — as well as staff members that we employ — to keep unwanted members out of the site.” And he’s adamant that it’s ultimately not his job, or anyone else’s, to police the activity of members of his site:

“You're talking about adults and they're going to do what they're going to do. If you're bored with your life and shoot heroin up your arm, it's really difficult for a website or any other venue where people meet to dictate what people can or cannot do.”

"Remorseful" isn't exactly the word that comes to mind here. I think it’s safe to say that, notorious death or no notorious death, it will be business as usual for Brandon Wade and Seeking Arrangement.

According to online security firm Symantec, everybody’s favorite mobile dating app is suffering from an “influx of spam bots and fake profiles.”

The presence of spammers and scammers isn't new to online dating sites, but so far it hasn't been a major concern for Tinder users. There are three kinds of spam campaigns currently targeting Tinder users. The first is adult webcam spam, in which bots engage real users in conversation and then try to persuade them to click on links to adult webcam websites.

A second common spam campaign promotes mobile apps, especially games, to Tinder users. Instead of directing people to adult webcam sites, this kind of spam tries to entice them into downloading and playing games like Castle Clash.

The third, and most common according to Symantec, kind of spam campaign involves fake prostitution profiles. These are typically identifiable by photos of women overlaid with text that details services, rates, and contact info. By including the info in photos rather than text, spammers can evade detection from spam filters searching for undesirable keywords in Tinder’s profiles.

What all three kinds of spam have in common is affiliate programs. In each case, the promoted destinations offer spammers money in exchange for converting leads. Spammers stand to make something like $6.00 per lead for a successful sign-up, and up to $60.00 for leads that become premium members. It may sound easy to avoid spammers, but plenty of people are falling for it. Symantec found that some spam links can get hundreds of thousands of clicks.

"For instance,” writes Satnam Narang for Symantec, “from the end of January 2014 until mid-April 2014, a campaign associated with a site called blamcams resulted in nearly half a million clicks across seven URLs. Depending on the offers given by the affiliate program and the number of successful conversions of leads, this particular spammer likely earned quite a bit of money."

So what can you do about it?

Report fake profiles to Tinder. Beneath every profile image there are three red dots. Click that icon to find the option to report the user. From there, a dialog window will open with three options. Select “Feels like SPAM”. It’s up to users themselves to police the Tinder community, so stay alert for fake profiles and spam bots and alert the app’s team so they are detected and eliminated as quickly as possible.

For more on this dating app you can check out our review of Tinder.